PHILADELPHIA, PA – Pornography in America is nothing new – it was just as rampant in Colonial times, historians reveal!

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Pornography in America is nothing new – it was just as rampant in Colonial times, historians reveal!

Our Founding Fathers amused themselves with smutty books and there was a big market in sexy paintings, sketches and engravings.

“There’s just been more attention paid to pornography nowadays because it’s more open,” declared Dr. John Potter.

Even Benjamin Franklin didn’t spend all his time flying kites – he was a passionate womanizer and an avid porn collector.

“We have all his smut here,” said an employee at the Library Company in Philadelphia, a rare book library that Franklin founded in 1731.

Archaeology students digging under historical buildings in Philadelphia have found pornographic objects left by early colonists, according to Dr. Potter, a museum curator emeritus. He says they dug up a pipe smoker’s tobacco tamper with two figures carved on it under Carpenter’s Hall, where the First Continental Congress met.

“It was a man and a woman in what you would call a compromising position,” the curator recalled.

Digging under Independence Hall, where the Liberty Bell hands, students discovered an X-rated wooden carving. And an obscene bottle stopper was found at another site.

Among the racy books read by early Americans were Aristotle’s Master Pie, a humorous sex guide; Fanny Hill, a tale of a woman’s sexual romps in 18th-century England; and a guidebook to Philadelphia’s brothels called Gay Houses and Ladies of Pleasure in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection.